Meanwhile, in the tiki bar…
“Tell me a story, J-Rod.” Marigold asks, playfully twirling a swizzle stick. While taking in the tall, stylish black man who looks like he got to Mars on an Esquire cover. “What is this guy doing here?” he’s wondering to himself.
With a quick wrist flip J-Rod spins a playing card forward and watches as it bounces off the lip of his fedora on the floor of the tiki bar. He fist-pumps the air. “Ohhhh! So close! A story you want? What kind of story?”
Marigold is leaning on the bar. “How the Schmeck did you end up on Mars, Jay?”
J-Rod is lining up another throw. He’s got the only sports coat / turtleneck combo on Mars. And man, and do those shoes look good. Lucky man. “Mars, heh. I was a man who had to get the fuck out of town.”
“You owe someone money?”
J-Rod frowns. ”No, not exactly.”
”What? Did the cops find the body?”
”Heh, newp. Nope, nothing like that.” J-Rod lets the card fly, another miss.
“You might say they drove me out of town.”
”The cops?”
”Nope. Not the cops, it started with the TP in my trees. Then flaming bags of dog poop on my doorstep. Then the Ronald Chump doll.”
”Eeeww! Gross! Who would stoop to that?”
”The Science-ology Troopers. My man Mr. Bartender, they’re like Storm Troopers but for the Church of Science-ology. They don’t like me much. A sense of humor is something they do not have.”
”Oh? Just what did you do? Piss in their corn flakes?”
”Nah. Worse.” J-Rod’s lining up another card. “I cut into their cash flow. They get antsy about that. I didn’t even need their money.” And it’s another miss. “Dang!”
”The whole thing started as kind of a prank.” He pauses. ”Yeah, it was the last night of the Drunk Weasel Fight Club NFT conference. Me and my crew had just cashed out…”
”Wait – you were into NFT’s? That fakey-fake stuff?”
”Nah, not really. We were into selling timeshares of NFT’s, for people who wanted to feel like they were playas, but couldn’t swing all the cash…”
”NFT timeshares were a thing?” Marigold looks doubtful.
”Oh fuck yeah, you better believe it. We pulled the cord and bailed out at the perfect moment – just as someone came up with blockchain mining of new timeshare date ranges.”
J-Rod shakes his head and gives a card a quiet kiss. “You should have seen those people, the speculators almost had jizz coming out of their tear ducts, desperate to get in on the action… but then the buzz wore off.”
”Let me guess… they were using off-brand BitCoin to buy blockchain-mined dates which don’t exist on the calendar to commit to timeshares on NFT GIF’s of drunk weasels which also don’t exist.”
J-Rod smacks his palms together with a loud clap. ”Yep, the holy grail of ‘market over-exuberance’ for one whole evening.” He flips the card towards his hat – pow! This time it’s in. J-Rod does a quick victory dance. “So we were sitting around, getting drunk…”
”…as one does…”
”…as one does while lounging on sacks of fresh, hot cash – spitballing what we were going to do to top that. Guess what we came up with?”
”Nostril deodorant? MelaniaCoin? The Rodco Pocket Phisherman for hackers?”
”Nah, right there at the bar we setup a GitHub repo for the ultimate self-exploiting scam: an Open Source religion.”
Marigold scratches his thick locks. ”I thought Open Source software was already a religion. And what’s a ‘github’?”
”No, no this wasn’t software. Github is this service that lets you share and collaborate to anyone anywhere on the internet. We started a religion where the text of our holy book was fully open source and you can add to it or even fork the project and have your own religion based on it any time you want.” He spins another card, pausing as it wafts towards the bucket. A miss.
“We thought it would be funny to call it ‘Open Science-ology’ but the twits at The Church of Science-ology were not amused. Hey, it turned out that our cult was cheaper than theirs, and a whole lot more fun.”
”Can I join?”
He shrugs, “Sure. Raise your left hand and repeat after me:”
”I <insert your name here>, solemnly promise to not get dirt on the living room carpet, pee in the pool or let the weasels out of their cage. Tip your waitress.”
”I think I can pull that off. Does she take Simoleons? I use a pancake-based currency.”
”We don’t actually need your money, but you’d better tip your waitress. Now that you’re in the cult, you can add any rules you want. Right there on GitHub.“
J-Rod grabs his mug from the bar and takes a swig. He leans on the bar and looks Marigold close in the eyes. “Turns out starting a cult is easy. Get a boat with an open bar, find some young, attractive women who don’t want a real job and the rest pretty much falls into place. Pretty soon we were so successful that one dazed and confused morning we found we’d also founded The Open Bullshit movement, which allows anyone to believe anything they want is true at any time.”
”Isn’t it that way already?”
”Well, sure. But it didn’t have a name.” J-Rod pulls back and sighs. ”It was about then we found someone had beheaded Mr. Bojangles.”
”Who dat?”
”My cat. I got the message. Didn’t even pack my bong, left that afternoon before they came for my bunny slippers. Now here I am. How’s that for a story?”
“If you didn’t have a Drunk Weasel Fight Club tattoo, I’d think you were making it up.”
”I’ll drink to that! Hey Marigold, these ice cubes are getting dry!”
Author’s note: Say what? Are NFT’s a thing?
Oh, and J-Rod’s open source religion really does have a very real Github repo.
Contribute some new religious thing to ‘The Bibble’ today!
And you can email J-Rod here: jrodgoinon@gmail.com
